Find a Question:

Software loophole in Facebook’s servers led to display the date wrong

Jan

3

2016

Software loophole resulted in servers for Facebook to display the date wrong on the eve of New Year’s Eve celebration where some congratulatory messages to users on the expiration of the 46 year friendships within the site appeared.

He participated some social network users pictures of congratulatory messages that emerged after the user entered in the New Year’s Day in local time in his country, but it’s interesting that most users do not exceed the age of thirty years, and Facebook was launched for the first time only 11 years ago, and therefore it is impossible to that there be friendship between users reached 46 years on the site.
Facebook
Photos of congratulatory messages
Facebook
Photos of congratulatory messages

To explain the cause of the problem must understand how storage dates inside Facebook databases that depend on the timing of Unix Unix Timestamp system, a system that calculates the seconds that have elapsed since 1.1.1970 in order to represent a specific time in history, as it represents the number 0 time 00: 00 on 01/01/1970.

As the time elapsed on the friendship between the new user account feature, all previous requests that has contained the number 0 in the date field in the Facebook databases to indicate the absence of a date, and after the conversion date using algorithms system will find the number 0, which is equal to 1 / 1/1970 which happens 46 years after entering the passage in 2016, which was considered algorithms time that elapsed since the friendship between users, and not a value to indicate the lack of a specific date.

Said Chelsea Kohler, a spokeswoman for Facebook, the site TechCrunch that the gap already existing software and team work Facebook is working to resolve it as soon as possible.

The loophole Facebook software is a very simple in front of a sudden stop, which hit in August Watts application on December 31 / December, without comment from the company until this mome